NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission to Explore Titan

Lauren Hinkel | EAPS News

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

NASA recently announced that it would be sending a drone-style quadcopter to Saturn's largest moon, The New York Times and others report.

Dragonfly, as the mission is called, will be capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements, studying the world’s mysterious atmosphere and topography while searching for hints of life on the only world other than Earth in our solar system with standing liquid on its surface. The mission will be developed and led from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md.

The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2026. Once at Titan in 2034, Dragonfly will have a life span of at least two-and-a-half years, with a battery that will be recharged with a radioactive power source between flights. Cameras on Dragonfly will stream images during flight, offering people on Earth a bird’s-eye view of the Saturn moon.

The mission's principal investigator is Elizabeth Turtle ’89 (Course 8). Joining her is MIT EAPS research scientist and mission co-investigator Jason Soderblom. He leads the Surface/Subsurface Properties Working Group and is a member of Surface Composition Working Group. Soderblom also supports development and calibration of DragonCam (the suite of Dragonfly cameras) and will lead the development of the exploration strategy for Selk crater -- the impact crater on Titan that Dragonfly will explore in search of evidence of recent exposures of liquid water.

"Titan is an extraordinary world in which organics rain out of a thick atmosphere onto an icy surface, generating a landscape that is eerily similar to that of Earth," Soderblom says. "The complex chemistry that occurs on Titan offers us an opportunity to study prebiotic chemistry that might give clues to the origin of life on the Earth. Additionally, impacts into Titan's icy crust will produce melt pools of liquid water that might even harbor life."

"Mars exploration has taught us that mobility is key to exploring a planetary surface," he says. "Dragonfly takes advantage of the unique environment at Titan by flying from study site to study site, allowing unprecedented mobility for a landed spacecraft."

Story Image: NASA's Dragonfly mission will arrive at Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in 2034, flying across its surface to study how the planet's conditions might resemble those on Earth before life formed. (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL)